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It’s May. Have you lined up your contracts for your summer facilities projects? It takes about 60 days

to write and advertise a Request for Proposal before responses arrive. Then it is at least another 30 days to evaluate the responses and send the award recommendation to the board of trustees. If you have not done that, what are your options?

Use your annual on-call contract with a facilities services provider who has already provided pricing based on a published construction/maintenance unit price book which covers 99% of all project types, or on pricing established in the competitive sealed proposal for construction and maintenance projects (not time and materials). Frequently called Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity or IDIQ, these on-call contracts specify a coefficient of the published construction/maintenance unit price. If you have already awarded such a contract to facilities services trades companies, then you have the contract and staffing needed for your summer facilities projects.

Use a cooperative contract that has already been awarded for facilities services. If you have specific vendors you wish to work with, you might search for those vendors and then see what cooperative contracts they have been awarded. In that case, ensure that the cooperative you are choosing is based in a government agency or at least has a lead government agency that awards the contracts. There are nonprofit organizations that use the name “cooperative” that are offering contracts that are not legal in Texas. Their agreements do not name any government, and thus are not an interlocal GOVERNMENTAL contract, as required by Interlocal Cooperative Contracts - Chapter 791.

Other contracts that may be helpful for getting construction and maintenance work completed over the summer include new Choice Partners facilities contracts awarded in April for maintenance and operations.